Path Planning and Tracking Control for Quadrotor Helicopters Based on Artificial Potential Field

This paper presents a path planning method that satisfies both environmental constraints and dynamics constraints of the quadrotor helicopters. An improved artificial potential field (APF) method is employed in path planning for the quadrotor to get a series of path points that meet environmental constraints. Using the differential flatness property of the system, a smooth reference trajectory connecting these path points satisfying the dynamics characteristics of the quadrotor is obtained. A cascaded control strategy is proposed for autonomous flight control of the quadrotor. The outer loop adopts high-order differential feedback control (HODFC) method, and the inner loop employs proportional-integral-derivative (PID) controller. Numerical simulations and experimental results show that the proposed control strategy has superior tracking performance compared with the cascaded PID controller.